“Okay, not a tattooed head. But y’know what I mean—maybe it’s a different kinda book. Either way—it’s almost nine—time to get out of here, Calvin.”
“And where you plan on going? To your apartment? To mine? You think those aren’t the first places Ellis is gonna look? He shot a federal agent, Lloyd! Trust me, the only way to bargain with this nutbag is if we have his favorite chip.”
My father steps back at the outburst—not at the words, but at who it came from.
“And stop giving me that my-boy’s-become-a-man look!” I quickly add. “It’s fifty times past annoying already!”
“I wasn’t looking at you,” he admits. “I was . . . There . . .” he says, motioning over my shoulder.
I turn around, following his finger to the open doors of the yawning, empty container.
“Where’s that water go to?” my father asks. Reading my confusion, he points again. “There. Right along . . .”
I crane my head and finally see it: on the floor of the container, in the very back. To the untrained eye, it’s another of the many thin puddles from the now melted ice. Something you’d never look twice at. Unless you happen to notice that the puddle is somehow running and disappearing underneath the container’s back wall.
I’ve seen this magic trick before: bad guys adding fake floors and ceilings in the hopes of smuggling something in.
My father kicks one of the shrimp boxes and sends it slamming into the back wall. There’s a hollow echo. No question, there’s something behind there.
Within thirty seconds, my dad’s got the handle from the jack in my van. He rams it like a shovel at the bottom right corner of the back wall, where there’s a small gap at the floor. After wedging it in place, he grabs the handle, pushes down with all his weight, and tries to pry it open. “It’s screwed into the—”
“Lemme try,” I say.
He pushes again. It doesn’t budge.
Outside, the siren keeps getting louder. As if it’s coming right at us.
“Lloyd!”
“I’m trying, it’s just— I can’t . . .” he blurts, clearly upset as he lets go, and I take over. The computer said he’s fifty-two years old. At this moment, the way he looks away and scratches his beard . . . he looks north of sixty.
With both hands gripping the handle, I wedge one foot against the wall, lean backward, and pull down as hard as I can. The wood is cheap, but it barely gives.
I reset my foot and pull harder. The siren howls toward us.
Krrrk.
The wood gives way and there’s a loud snap, sending me falling backward. As I crash on my ass, two screws tumble and ping along the metal floor, freeing the bottom right corner of the wall.
“Now here!” my dad blurts, pointing to the next set of screws on the far right side of the wall. They’re at waist height and, with the makeshift crowbar, easy to get at, but all I’m focused on is the unnerving excitement in my dad’s voice.
“C’mon, Cal—we got it!” he says as I put my weight into it and another hunk of wood is pulled away from the screws. Years ago during my father’s trial, his lawyer argued that the true cause of my mother’s death was her mental instability—he said she had an alter ego, like a second face: one that was good, one that was evil. Naturally, the prosecutor pounced on it, saying my dad was the one with the alter ego: Lloyd the Saintly Defendant and Lloyd the Reckless Killer.
Three minutes ago, my dad was winded and hobbling. Suddenly, he’s gripping the right side of the thin wooden wall, prying and bending it open and thrilled to find his treasure. One man. Two faces.
“This is it! Grab it here!” he says, tugging the right side of the thin wall, which has now lost enough screws that the harder we pull, the more it curves toward us. I try to see what’s behind it—some kind of box with its long side running against the true back wall—but with the shadow of the wood, it’s too dark to see. “Keep pulling!” my father says, still cheerleading as the wood finally begins to crack. “Uno . . . dos . . .”
With a final awkward semi-karate move, my father kicks the wood panel, which snaps on impact and sends us both stumbling back. As the last splinters of particleboard somersault through the morning sun, we both stare at what my dad was really transporting—the true object of Ellis’s desire.
That’s not just a box.
It’s a coffin.
21
It’s a casket,” my father stutters.
“I know what it is. Is it—? Is someone in it?”
He doesn’t move, still staring at the dark wood box as another siren begins to scream in the distance. It’s only a matter of time till one’s headed here.
In front of us, it’s definitely a coffin, though it’s oddly rounded at the edges. Along the top, yellow and white papers are pasted randomly in place, while a thin band of copper piping runs along the bottom. To be honest, I thought my dad was bullshitting when he said he didn’t know what was in the truck, but from the confusion on his face, this is news to him.
“Help me get it out,” my dad says, rushing forward and grabbing one of the wooden handles at the head of the casket. “Yuuuh!” he yells, leaping back and frantically wiping his hand on his pants.
“What? Something’s on there?”
He holds up his open palm, which is dotted with small black flecks of dirt. Fresh soil. I look back at the coffin. Most of it’s wiped clean, but you can still see chunks of soil caked in the edges of the trim.
“Someone dug this out of the ground,” I say.
“Before Panama, the sheet said it was in Hong Kong,” my dad says. “Do they have rounded coffins there?”
“You think there’s a body inside?”
There’s a loud chirp as my phone shrieks through the warehouse. It’s nearly ten a.m. and we still haven’t slept. Caller ID tells me who it is. If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t pick up.
“Cal here,” I answer.
“Good time, bad time?” a fast-talking man with a deep baritone asks through my cell as yet another siren yet again gets louder.
I watch my father wrap a page of old newspaper around the pull bar on the coffin, which is only half sticking out through the hole in the fake wall. My dad tugs hard, but he can’t do it alone. Pinching the phone with my shoulder, I race next to him, grip the other pull bar along the side, and pull as hard as I can.
“No . . . ruhhhh . . . perfect time,” I say into the phone, feeling every hour of my exhaustion.
No surprise, Benny laughs.
Two years ago, Benny Ocala came tearing out of the local Seminole Indian reservation, searching for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandfather, who had wandered, literally, off the reservation. Roosevelt and I found the old man in a Pembroke Pines front yard, sitting in a kiddie pool with his socks on. Today, Benny’s the Seminole tribe’s very own chief of police. His own sovereign nation. Which explains why, when I left the hospital earlier tonight, I drove the extra six miles to give Benny the bullet that the doctor pulled outta my dad.
“Please tell me you were able to trace it,” I say with another tug. The casket rolls to the right, shedding bits of dirt along the floor as we angle it through the open hole.
“We’re Indians, Cal. My ancestors traced deer farts.”
I’m tempted to point out he went to Tulane and drives a Camry, but I’m far too focused on the yellow and white papers pasted to the coffin. I can’t read the writing—it’s either Chinese or Japanese—but there’s no mistaking the small crosses at the bottom of each page. Across the top of one of the pages it says, in English, “Ecclesiastes.” These are Bible pages. Is that what Ellis meant by a book?